what was coming next. Where does Reacher go from the concrete ramp?
But before we got onto – or rather to (delete on!) – that, we had to consider the question of ‘bigger than’ versus ‘as big as’.
‘Hold on,’ says I, ‘you’ve changed this bit, haven’t you?’
‘It had to be,’ he said. ‘I was trying to work out why I wasn’t really happy with a grain silo bigger than an apartment house. Obviously it’s adjacent to Reacher himself, so I wanted to associate him with the silo. But then he is associated with Keever too. So I realized I needed to echo the first sentence.’
Moving a guy as big as Keever … a grain silo as big as an apartment house. It made sense. The first section starts with the mysterious Keever. The second section switches to Reacher. But there are parallel constructions – to do with comparative sizes – hooking the two of them together. At one level, the novel was all about momentum, forward movement, the sprung or ‘tripping’ rhythm that would ‘lead the reader by the hand’ through the narrative; at another, it was all about the links that cut right across the story line – little subterranean echoes, rhymes, parallels, repetitions, variations. There was a horizontal, linear, syntagmatic axis, propelling you forward, but there was just as much a vertical, paradigmatic axis, a network – at the level of phonology and semantics – holding everything together, keeping it tight and connected. It was prose, of course, but it was just as obviously poetry. Make Me is the song of Reacher.
Make Me, that hugely resonant and imperative title, had just acquired another meaning in my mind: this was the novel itself speaking to its author, its maker, crying out to him, Go on then, make me, and make me as good as you’ve ever made anything.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
